Master's Thesis by Mariana Morais

Supervision by Sofia Ponte

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Abstract

Headless Women and Other Events: Tours for the Public Art in Porto is an artistic project that examines two centuries of public art in Porto through the lens of women in the 21st Century. The project identified and spatialized in a map the representations of the feminine materialized in monuments and statuary in the city. Most of the observed works follow this model: the masculine is represented as virile, strong, active, dominating and the feminine, as sensitive, fragile, passive and submissive, establishing a dichotomous and excluding relationship between the concept of masculine and feminine. Through a reflection on these narratives related to women, both in the past and in the present, I found that the public art in Porto still follows an essentialist model of representation and it seems this model extends to an objectification of the "real women". Moreover, as a contribution to a diversification of women's stories, I considered Peter Osborne's definition of post-conceptual art and I realized this artistic project consisting of several iterations, such as: the map of “Headless Women in Public Art”, a device mapping that brings together the representations of women in monuments and statuary in Porto; three tours - “Headless Women”, “Women and Monuments” and “Art and Public” - for pedestrian visits aiming at broadening the debate on gender relations in the city; a series of wheat-paste posters encouraging greater participation in the exchange of ideas on gender and citizenship; and the embroidered maps, both physically and digitally, which originated the map in fabric and https://headlesswomeninpublic.art, integrating this issue into the virtual environment of social networks following contemporary feminist movements.

Keywords

Women in Public Art, Map of Porto, Feminist Narratives, Gender and Citizenship, Postconceptual Art.